IV
Pershing drove himself as hard as he pushed his men. He stayed up until 3 and 4 A.M. reading reports and pondering maps. Rumors drifted into headquarters that Foch and Clemenceau were urging Wilson to replace him with Tasker Bliss. One day, in a car with his aide, Major James Collins, the exhausted general put his head in his hands and moaned to his dead wife, “Frankie, Frankie, my God sometimes I don’t know how I can go on.”20
No one else saw anything but the iron general, still in charge.“Things are going badly,” he told Henry Allen, commander of the Ninetieth Division.“But by God! Allen, I was never so much in earnest in my life and we are going to get through.” George C. Marshall considered this Pershing’s finest hour.21
Others think Pershing’s finest hour came a few days later. Reluctantly, ruefully, with that amazing objectivity about himself that was one of his most remarkable traits, Pershing realized he did not have the answer to the Argonne. On October 12, he gave Hunter Liggett command of the First Army and created a Second Army to operate east of the Meuse under Robert Lee Bullard. Pershing became the commander of the army group, a chairman of the board instead of a CEO.
The First Army continued to attack for another seven days, meeting fierce German resistance that inflicted heavy casualties. The Rainbow Division was in the thick of this carnage, and Douglas MacArthur continued to play a hero’s role. One of the chief obstacles to the American advance was the heavily fortified hill, the Côte de Chatillon. General Summerall, promoted to corps commander, visited MacArthur’s command post on the night of October 13–14. An attack on Chatillon was scheduled for the next morning. “Give me Chatillon or a list of five thousand casualties,” Summerall said.
MacArthur, who had been badly gassed the day before—he still stubbornly refused to wear a mask—replied, “If this brigade does not capture Chatillon you can publish a casualty list of the entire brigade with the brigade commander’s name at the top.” It took the Americans three nightmarish days and the loss of 4,000 men to accomplish—but Chatillon became American territory. In the thick of the flying bullets and shells virtually every moment, MacArthur won a second Distinguished Service Cross.
The capture of Chatillon was considered a breach, if not a breakthrough, of the Kreimhilde Stellung, the main German defense line in the Argonne. It had taken three weeks and 100,000 casualties to achieve what Pershing and his staff had thought they could do in a single day.22
At this point, the First Army was, in the opinion of one staff officer,“a disorganized and wrecked army.” Liggett promptly went on the defensive. When Pershing persisted in hanging around headquarters, talking about launching another attack, Liggett told him to “go away and forget it.” Pershing meekly obeyed.23
V
Shirley Millard was still working beside Dr. Le Brun in the French hospital near Soissons. But their relationship had undergone a probably inevitable change. Millard had met her fiancé, Ted, in Paris, on his way to the front and decided she still loved him. The surgeon accepted the news philosophically, and they remained friends and colleagues in the operating room.
But Millard had a new problem. She could not shake the dread that swept over her as American casualties poured into the hospital. On September 15, she went to a funeral for four Americans who had died the previous day: Donnelly, Wendel, Goldfarb and Auerbach. Millard wept so hard that her fellow nurses became alarmed, fearing a breakdown. An inner voice asked, What’s the sense of it? Why did they have to be killed before they had even begun to live?
For the first time, Millard found wisdom in Pershing’s decision to ban relatives and fiancées of soldiers from France. Every wounded man she saw made her imagine Ted with similar wounds.“It required enormous effort to perform tasks that had been easy before,” she told her journal.
On September 20 came news that multiplied her dread tenfold: Ted was wounded. Dr. Le Brun gallantly arranged for Millard to make an emergency trip to Paris. In a hospital there, she found Ted with a fractured leg and a wounded left arm suspended in a frame. “Oh darling,” she gasped. “Thank God you’re not hurt!”
It took some doing to soothe an outraged Ted into accepting her explanation that “hurt” meant a wound to the head, the chest or the stomach. Those were the ones that often proved fatal. A thoughtful nurse drew a screen around Ted’s bed, and soon Millard’s greeting became something they would joke about for the rest of their lives.
Back in the hospital, Millard found she could concentrate on her work again, with Ted in relative safety. But the anguish of seeing Americans with mortal wounds was still acute. One man, a sergeant in the Second Engineers named Charlie Whiting, came very close to breaking her heart. He had been shot in the spine and was totally paralyzed.“He is so loveable, clean and sweet as spring water,” Millard told her journal. “He cannot speak more than one or two words at a time, in a gasping whisper, but he manages to say Thank you and smiles with his eyes whenever anything is done for him.”
The doctors put Whiting in the salle de mort, the death room. There was no hope.“He cannot move a muscle except his eyes and two fingers of his left hand,” Millard wrote in her journal. One day Whiting tried to say something to her. She bent her head close to his lips and heard “My mother . . .” with his two fingers, he managed to direct her to his pocketbook, where she found his mother’s name and address.
Millard promised to write to her. Tears filled Whiting’s eyes. It was the first time he had cried. Millard realized he was weeping not for himself but for his mother.“I patted his hand and busied myself, fighting back my own tears.”24
VI
On September 17, 1918, YMCA canteen worker Marian Baldwin confided exciting news to her American correspondent. Her life was about to undergo a dramatic change. She had been invited to join another woman in a permanent connection with the 148th Infantry Regiment of the Thirty-Seventh Division. She and her partner, Alice, were given a camouflaged Ford camion, “chuck full of supplies” and orders for each day with “official looking road maps” to tell them where to go. They also got a one-eyed driver who had grave doubts about women getting mixed up with a war.
Ideally, they were supposed to reach a town ahead of the regiment and set up their canteen, laying out cigarettes, chocolates and writing paper for letters home. At their first stop, a little room at a convent in the town of Moyen, they were swamped when the regiment arrived.“The boys sat all over the floor and on the window sill and we had a very merry time until well after dark, when taps sounded and they all disappeared in the most amazing manner,” Baldwin wrote.
A few days later, on another move, they lost the regiment and drove all night down bad roads, with their YMCA driver cursing and “Lizzie,” as they called their camion, close to running out of gas. At a crossroads, an officer stopped them. A huge truck convoy was just behind them. Where in the #%&@ did they think they were going? he asked. He was stunned when a woman’s voice answered him. Alice used her flashlight to show him their map and he gasped with surprise.“Alice!” he said.
“Jim!” exclaimed Alice. They were old and close friends, thousands of miles from “God’s country.”
After getting directions, they found themselves in a huge column of trucks heading for the Argonne. Whenever they passed a truck, they waved and the doughboys in it came alive.“Honest-to-God American girls!” they shouted and waved their helmets. In Fains, they caught up to their regiment and set up shop in a French barracks with a dirt floor. It was quickly jammed with their “boys.”
Two nights later, the women were part of the final massive movement toward the jump-off point for the Argonne attack. At the town of Revigny, they went to Fifth Corps headquarters to ask where their regiment was camped. The major general in charge took one look at them and wrote on their orders:“These two ladies are to be returned at once to their Y.M. C.A. headquarters at Bar le Duc.” the general told them he could not allow them to stay in Revigny. It would soon be under bombardment from German artillery. He had two
daughters at home just their ages.“I admire the work you are doing but this is no place for women,” he said.
Ignoring the general’s orders, they stayed in Revigny and listened to the thunder of American artillery as the Argonne offensive began. A week later, Baldwin, Alice and two other “Y girls” revolted, took their bedding rolls and musette bags and began a search for their regiments. After days of wandering they reached Auzeville, which had been shelled mercilessly by the Germans only the day before. Nearby was the Thirty-Seventh Division’s headquarters, where they received a cordial welcome. Told that their regiment was at the front, the women went to work anyway, standing in the cold mud handing out tobacco and chocolates to “hundreds and hundreds of men”—trivial gifts, they knew, but a way of saying America’s women were with the doughboys in spirit.
At last, the 148th Regiment came out of the lines. “Their faces were lined and their eyes glazed with the fatigue they had seen,” Baldwin wrote. She and Alice rushed to greet them, calling out,“Where’s Joe? How’s Bill?” Too often the answer was a muttered “Gone west.” that night, Baldwin confessed,“Our hearts were pretty heavy as we crept into our blankets.”25
VII
In the United States, another fight to the finish, almost as savage as the one taking place on the battlefield, was raging in the newspapers and on podiums and platforms across the nation. The Republicans, led by an enraged Theodore Roosevelt, were going for Woodrow Wilson’s jugular. Doubling Roosevelt’s ardor was a growing sense that he could capture the Republican nomination for president in 1920. Early in August, he had arranged a public reconciliation with former president William Howard Taft. More and more people saw TR as the man who could unite the Old Guard and progressive wings of the GOP in a landslide victory.
Months before his son Quentin died in his decrepit Nieuport, Roosevelt had made a speech to Maine Republicans that set the general tone of the fall campaign. He had circulated a draft to Old Guarders such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root and progressives such as Senator Hiram Johnson before he spoke. The address was a savage attack on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his plans for a negotiated peace. Riding the rising crest of anti-German war rage, Roosevelt pledged the Republican Party to “war to the hilt.” the only hope of future peace in Europe, he bellowed, was Germany’s “unconditional surrender.”26
If he felt this way in March, it is not hard to imagine Roosevelt’s attitude in August and September, with his youngest son dead, his two older sons badly wounded, and the German army in obvious retreat on the Western Front. An indication was his encounter with Eleanor Roosevelt at a family funeral not long before Franklin returned from his tour of the Western Front. TR took his favorite niece aside and told her, again, that time was running out for her husband. Franklin needed to resign from his desk job and risk sudden death with the rest of the real men of his generation. Eleanor barely concealed her anger as she told Uncle Ted her husband had tried to enlist, but the president had ordered him to stay where he was.27
Senator Lodge, TR’s close friend and ardent supporter, eagerly joined in the attack on Wilson. The death of Lodge’s son-in-law, Congressman Augustus Gardner, added an undertone of bitterness to his politics, not unlike TR’s grief for Quentin. Late in August, Lodge made a Senate speech in which he insisted,“We ought not to discuss anything with the Germans at present.” He decried the idea of leaving Germany “unharmed” while Belgium and France lay ravaged.“No peace that satisfies Germany in any degree can ever satisfy us,” he thundered.28
Three days later, in a speech to 100,000 cheering Republicans at Springfield, Illinois, Theodore Roosevelt gave Wilson more of this no-compromise medicine. He urged Americans to beware of milksop internationalists in the administration and the White House. They were all too eager to play the game of German autocracy.“Professional internationalism stands toward patriotism exactly as free love stands toward a clean and honorable and duty-performing family life,” tR roared. The key idea on which foreign policy should rest was American nationalism, coupled with a strong army and navy. On that basis, the United States could do justice to all nations and make sure they did justice to America.29
From Paris, a New York Times correspondent reported that American soldiers agreed with the GOP; like most reporters, he was reflecting what he heard from AEF headquarters. The Times of London, German-hating Lord Northcliffe’s creature, applauded in an editorial entitled “Dictated Peace.”
Secretary of State Lansing, the chief Germanophobe in the Wilson administration before the war began, ruefully noted in his diary that the psychological effect of the Allied victories in France had been “peculiar.” It only seemed to produce more bitterness toward the German people. In his Washington, D.C., cocoon, Lansing was apparently unaware of the near psychotic war rage gripping the rest of the country.30
Most other Democrats were equally baffled by the way success on the Western Front was failing to obliterate the Republicans, who had been ranting for eighteen months about Wilson’s inept war effort. The Democrats were caught flatfooted by the Republicans’ switch to attacking Wilson’s peace policy, which coalesced beautifully (from the GOP’s point of view) with their prewar denunciation of Wilson as a secret pacifist and timid soul who did not have the courage to make war. In many minds, this argument was easily converted into suspicion of the president as a peacemaker who would be too soft on the monstrous Germans. With George Creel and his Committee on Public Information inundating the country with German hatred, the Democrats found it hard to escape this political cul-de-sac.
VIII
Other worries also disconcerted the Democrats. Votes for women were coming to a boil, and the party Wilson led was a two-headed creature, unequipped to deal with the issue. Overcoming his wife’s prejudices and his own, the president had endorsed woman suffrage in January 1918 and urged the Senate to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, which would then go to the states for ratification.
But the Southern wing of the party, viewing reality through the myopia of segregation, declined to listen. Among the most outspoken was Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, belaborer of Senator Robert La Follette and everyone else opposed to the war. For six months, the Southerners on the Senate Committee for Privileges and Elections refused to permit the suffrage bill to reach the floor for a vote.31
The woman suffrage movement was divided into radical and moderate wings. The radical leader, fiery Alice Paul of New Jersey, saw a Southerner in the White House paying lip service but doing nothing else for her cause. She denounced Wilson repeatedly and called on every woman with a vote to cast it against the entire Democratic Party. The moderate leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, was almost as difficult. She threatened to rally women voters against a number of western Democratic senators, apparently oblivious to their inability to change the minds of their Southern colleagues.32
The Senate’s Republicans, determined to win the election and eager to placate the progressive wing of their party, which supported the suffrage amendment, saw another large chink in the Democrats’ armor. They caucused in late August 1918 and endorsed woman suffrage. The chink rapidly became a wound.
Joe Tumulty was a passionate supporter of woman suffrage. He politicked on the issue day and night, trying to bring it to a floor vote. Letters signed by the president bombarded the Southern naysayers. When conservative Senator Ollie James of Kentucky died, Tumulty went to his funeral and persuaded the state’s governor to appoint a liberal who would support the suffrage amendment. Thanks largely to Tumulty’s efforts, the measure finally got out of committee and came to a vote in late September.
Tumulty warmly seconded Treasury Secretary McAdoo’s plea for a speech by the president to support the suffragists. An uneasy Wilson, still not a passionate advocate, consented and spoke to the Senate on September 30. He went all out, calling the amendment “vital to the winning of the war.” the result was a disastrous humiliation. With Southern Democrats voting in a bloc, the amendment lost by two votes.�
��When the president says we can’t lick Ludendorff [and] scare Bulgaria . . . because nigger women in Mississippi can’t vote, I decline to agree with him,” Senator Williams said.33
The next day, newspapers reported another presidential humiliation. The New Jersey State Democratic Convention had rejected a woman suffrage plank in its election platform. The Newark Evening News, no friend of Wilson’s, chortled: “It will not be overlooked that while the president was pleading at Washington for the adoption of the suffrage amendment, a Democratic convention in his home state declined to include suffrage in its principles.” the implication was all too clear: Wilson was politically impotent or a faker—perhaps both.34
IX
Also lurking in the political wings was the Eighteenth Amendment, better known as Prohibition. The movement was an offshoot of the abolition crusade that ignited the Civil War. Having left the freed blacks to the tender mercies of the defeated Southerners, the descendants of these reformers selected the saloon as their next target. They began in a nursery of abolitionism, Oberlin, Ohio, and the weapon they forged was the local option law. By 1900, thirty-seven states had these laws, and the machinery of petitions, letters, telegrams parades and mass meetings was worked out.
By 1914, whole states, especially in the South, had banned alcohol. Oklahoma even entered the Union with a dry constitution. Over 20,000 Anti-Saloon League (ASL) speakers were preaching Prohibition in church halls and other public platforms around the country. World War I gave the ASL and its ally, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the opportunity to go national. They had already penetrated Congress with a 1913 law that banned the shipment of “intoxicating liquor of any kind” into dry states.
The Illusion of Victory Page 35